


The cosmology of you and me

by Teatrolley



Series: the repeated image [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Established Relationship, It's quite emotional, Just be aware if you're easily triggered, M/M, Overly dramatic attempt to explore some thoughts through writing, Suicidal ideation but not really, mentions of drug use, they love each other a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 07:18:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6601846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teatrolley/pseuds/Teatrolley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you know that poem?” John asks him. “’Do not go gentle into that good night’?”<br/>“Yes,” Sherlock says.<br/>“’Rage, rage, against the dying of the light’?”<br/>“I know it.”<br/>John takes his hands between his own. The texture of his skin is pressed against Sherlock’s once more.<br/>“Let’s go gently,” he says.</p><p>_________________</p><p>Sherlock has lived sixteen lives. This is his last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to the fic "The repeated image" but can be read without having read that first, although a few things might go unexplained. 
> 
> The first one was largely me having thoughts. I had more of those. So here this is.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

“Do you know that poem?” John asks him. “’Do not go gentle into that good night’?”

Sherlock closes his eyes, briefly. Imprints the image in front of him into his synapses: John, smiling. John, tender. John, old; John, young; John, in-between. John. Just that. John.

“Yes,” he says.

“’Rage, rage, against the dying of the light’?”

“I know it.”

John takes his hands between his own. The texture of his skin is pressed against Sherlock’s once more. For the last time. Calloused at the fingertips, soft in the middle. A metaphor, in that, Sherlock thinks. The wedding band that has been there so many times cold, but always clean, shining, and warmed by the both of them now.

“Let’s go gently,” John says.

__

 

This time he finds John when they’re young.

He’s only ever seen images before. Photographs, old and ragged at the edges. A John whose smile he’d never touched, and laughter he’d never heard. Shown to him by an older version. A broader version.

John is softer, when he’s young. Because he hasn’t yet grown into his shoulders and his jawbone and his muscles. Because he hasn’t yet been through the rough patches Sherlock knows are to come.

They meet in a bar, this time. It’s John’s own birthday party. He’s eighteen. 

Sherlock is a year younger. He feels it. It’s strange, but he always has. Despite his many lives, he still gets the feeling of growing older each time around. Youth always sits in him, still. 

It’s not their usual scene, the bar. It’s not the kind of places they’ll go to, later, when they can mingle with people like themselves, queer and out and proud. This is before John has reached that security. 

They sit in the corner, John and his friends. Stamford, who they will know later, is among them. Sherlock settles in at the bar, making sure that John will be able to have a good view of him. His shirt is a little too tight. His hair is made up, with a messiness that will make the mind wander to sex. He knows how to entice John; get him to come over. 

He does. Only under the disguise of getting a new round of drinks, but Sherlock doesn’t mind. It’s not shame, he knows. John has talked about this before. It’s just the uncertainty of being young and still figuring things out. 

“Hello,” John says. His tone is deliberate. He clearly wants something.

Sherlock knows how to hide a smile. He’s done it before, when needed. So he is able to do it here. But it’s difficult.

He likes this part. John, taking him in, eyes roaming, licking his lips. John trying to pick him up. John, a little uncertain, underneath it all. Because there’s the same insistent tug present, as the very first time. He always looks like there’s something at stake. Like if Sherlock rejects him, he’ll have lost something more significant than the situation warrants. 

“Hi,” Sherlock says. I’ve missed you. You look good. How long before you’ll let me kiss those eyelids as you fall asleep?

John shifts on his feet. Does that watching, eyes down Sherlock’s body, stopping at his neck. He bites his lower lip.

“It’s my birthday,” he says. He’s a little tipsy, Sherlock realizes, as he points to a badge on his chest, which says his age in numbers.

“You’re old enough to buy me a drink, then,” Sherlock says. He watches when John’s teeth are shown to him, as he grins, wide, and drunk, and surprised. 

“Yes,” John says. He watches Sherlock, before turning to the bar. Then he glances back. Unsure. Sherlock must be his first boy, this time. 

“I’m John,” he says. He holds out his hand, open and welcoming. “By the way.”

“Sherlock,” Sherlock says. He takes John’s hand, gives it a firm squeeze. He’s reluctant to let go but, to his amusement, so is John. His thumbs caress Sherlock’s knuckles, for a moment. 

“Sherlock,” he says. As if testing it in his mouth, and deciding that it tastes good. “Sherlock. Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“I’m drunk.” John’s hand is on his shoulder now, warm through the fabric of his shirt. “And you’re very pretty.”

John’s hand is warm against his shoulder. It’s only been seventeen, this time; seventeen years since the last time he saw John. Sherlock still grasps onto that. John touches his shoulder.

He touches John’s arm. His wrist. Turns it, puts the skin of the inner forearm on display, milky white and fragile. He could kiss it. He won’t, but he could, some day soon. 

“Pen,” he requests, of no one in particular, and has one handed to him. John watches him; fascinated. Sherlock puts the tip of the pen between his lips, and keeps the cap there, as he frees the rest. John’s eyes linger. John licks his own. 

“I’m giving you my number,” Sherlock explains. Writes it down, all of the digits, on that skin he won’t-but-could kiss. It’s a lifeline. Has been. John doesn’t know yet. John looks at them like they’re a pick-up in the making, and he’s in favour.

“Why?” he asks. “I’m not by best self right now.”

Oh, John, Sherlock thinks. My love. You’re always the best you could ever be. 

“Then show me your best self,” he says. “Tomorrow. I’ll be waiting for your call.”

He needs to, just once. To hand the fate of their making over to John, instead of keeping it in his own two palms, safe and always put into creation. Tomorrow, he says. What he means is, I want to see if you will.

John’s hand turns around in his grasp. Fingertips come down to touch his wrist. John is leaning in closer. John is wanting. Sherlock is aflame with it.

“Sherlock,” John says. Slurring it, making it deep. Filthy. But his cheeks are pink. This is still a thing he needs to dare to do.

“Mm–hm?”

“I would like to kiss you.”

Sherlock turns up his head. John is in-between his legs by now. Nearer, still. He is closing in on his target. Sherlock, that is.

“Then do it,” Sherlock says. 

John’s lips are hesitant. Yielding. Not taking as much charge, not as dominant, as they usually are. How, Sherlock thinks, can you live this long, and still experience things anew all the time?

Sherlock is the desperate one then. Sherlock is the one who claws at John’s upper arms, presses himself in close, makes it firm, hard, _craving_.

“Sherlock,” John says, and for a moment, for a brief second, it almost sounds like he’s recognizing love. Sherlock looks down, swallows, does it again. He’s stronger than he thought he was, if he can refrain from crying now. He claws, and blinks, and tries to remember that no, John doesn’t know him yet. No, John never will.

When he looks back up, John is watching him. His gaze, upon Sherlock’s face, is gentle. Kind. Sherlock worries he gave too much away. It should be dripped in, he thinks, this time. With a young John, it can’t be his beginning line. The information should be given only in time.

Palms are on his cheeks; John’s. His gaze is fascinated, yet again. His lips are slightly upturned at the edges.

“Who are you?” he asks. Like it’s a song. Like he’s coming from a dream, waking from it, still in it. 

“A strange man,” Sherlock says. John calls him that, often. Later on.

“Or brilliant,” John, this John, says. His hands are back on Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock hasn’t stopped noticing. He smiles. 

“Call me,” he says. 

“I will.” It’s true on his lips. Sherlock believes him. “Sherlock.” Tasting it, again. Trying it out, trying it on. Realizing it. “Sherlock. I think you’ll be very strange indeed.”

“Or brilliant,” Sherlock says.

John, for the first time, grins. John, for the billionth time, grins.

__

They go for coffee. John smiles when he sees him, and stands up from the table he’s been sitting at, waiting. He watches Sherlock walk up to him. They meet. They wait.

It’s significant, this time. Here you are, Sherlock thinks. Again, for the fourteenth time. Here we are; you and me, and all of the things we’ll be, all of the possibilities, between us now. Here it is, the centre of his life, for one last time. 

John reaches out his hand, over the pool of their life’s prospects, as if he’s saying, “let’s make a deal.”

“Hello,” he says. His lips upturned, once more. He exhales a breath of laughter; amused. “Again.”

Sherlock doesn’t stop his smile this time. Again, he thinks. As always. From the beginning, then.

“Hi,” he says. “Again.” 

Their hands meet. Squeeze, hold tight, linger. Don’t let go. Their eyes meet. Fondness, smiling, there you are, _John_.

Their lips meet. 

How could they not?

__

This is Sherlock’s sixteenth life. It is also his last. 

This time, when he turns five, and all of the memories come crashing back to him, rushing in like a tidal wave, all he feels is tired. He thought about it in his fifteenth life. While John was losing him yet again, slowly, this time, he thought of how some things, even the thing of life, must come to an end. 

He counts it on his fingers. All of the years he’s had. All of the variations. This is a condition he’s in, but it’s not one that the human brain was made to contain. Well. Really, the human heart. 

Muscles grow stronger from usage. The heart must, too. Sherlock’s has. He gets better at it over time: loving. Better at the variations of ways to articulate it. Better at recognizing it when it is returned.

But muscles must someday stop. Sherlock’s legs get tired and worn in old age. His heart, it seems, has reached its time, too. 

He crawls into Mycroft’s bed. As always. Arms are there to accept him in. He was expected. 

He doesn’t speak. Mycroft’s arm is around him, and he doesn’t speak. How do you say it? Life is coming to an end for me, I think?

He speaks.

He says, “This is my last one.”

Silence. Breathing, and then, a drawn-in gasp of emotion. Mycroft will lose him the most. Or Mycroft will come with.

“Yes,” Mycroft says then. “I thought it might be about time.”

Sherlock puts his head into Mycroft’s chest, when he closes his eyes, and sleeps. 

__

He thought maybe waiting would be the right thing to do. Would John believe him, this time, he thinks? John did, once, but he was older, then. He knew more of lives dark sides, more of the desperation. He could see it, probably, more clearly; the way Sherlock looked at him and _saw_. 

But he can’t wait. 

Coffee turns to lunch. Lunch turns to a walk around the part, walking turns to dinner. Dinner turns to drinks and then John, outside, kissing him gently up against a brick-building wall, with the moonlight shining down upon them. Sherlock is young too, and it’s maddening, the way John holds his hand as he lets their lips meet. 

“I need to tell you something,” he says. He turns away to do it, so John’s lips hit his cheek instead, but John appears not to mind. He squeezes Sherlock’s hand. There are fires burning in his eyes, when he watches Sherlock, waiting. 

“I need to tell you something,” Sherlock says. He says, “Is it not going fast, do you think?” He says, “Ask me if we’ve met before?”

John doesn’t hit him this time, when he answers the question with a yes. John doesn’t hit him, but he pulls his hand away, and that is, really, far, far worse. 

“What do you mean?” he asks. But his face is closed off in a way Sherlock forgot it could be. It’s been so long. Last life didn’t have many fights towards the end.

He says, “I mean I’ve lived before.” He says, “This is my sixteenth time.” He says, “You. I–” and stops, because John doesn’t look like he’ll recognize love now.

“That’s not funny,” John says. 

“I’m not joking.” 

John’s mannerisms of anger develop quickly, it seems. He sniffs, then hums. He takes a step back, then one forward, like it is trapping energy inside of him and he can’t get it out.

“Are you fooling me?”

“No.”

“Why should I trust you? Hmm?”

“John,” he begs. He didn’t realize this kind of desperation would live within him here. But he’s seventeen. Maybe that’s why. 

“Hmm?”

“Harry is on drugs,” he says. It’s the same story, most of the time. She begins early. But this is the start. John will only have lived with it for a few months.

He walks away. He leaves Sherlock there, up against the wall where he kissed him just before, and stalks away with angry steps. His back is tight, like he’s fuming. I should have told him sooner, Sherlock thinks. And: I should have told him later. No one trusts a boy of seventeen. Not even the boy who might love him.

He sags against the wall, and thinks, so maybe not this one, then. I can’t go out like this.

But John is wiser even now than Sherlock might ever be. And John must feel it too, like the first time; the _something_ , there already from the first time their eyes meet. 

He comes back. His steps are as angry as when he walked away, but he comes back.

“This is not what I meant by strange,” he says, before he reaches Sherlock.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock tries. But the words are swallowed down by John’s lips when he kisses him. It’s hard, and confused, and upset, but he kisses him. Sherlock gobbles it up, gulps it, like it’s oxygen and he’s been deprived. 

It is still hard, when John puts their foreheads together, and pants his fuming breath into the skin on Sherlock’s face. 

“Sixteen?” he asks. Sherlock swallows.

“Yes.”

“That’s a lot of kisses then,” John says. 

There he goes again with the kindness, despite it all. There he goes again with the swelling Sherlock’s heart. 

“Yes,” he says. 

“Are you bored of them, yet?” 

My love, Sherlock thinks. You are far too good to me.

“Never.”

“Good.”

John kisses him. It’s not fond, but it’s less bruising. It’s not happiness, forgiveness, love, but it is acceptance. We can do this, it says. I don’t understand. But we can do this.

“Good,” he repeats. Sherlock kisses him back.

___

Sixteen. That is the amount of lives that he has lived by now.

The worst, by far, was the thirteenth. The one where he was too late, the one with Mary, was bad. It was his heart, on the ground, stamped on, repeatedly. His thirteenth was the knife, too. 

John was kind in it. John was brave, and grumpy, and marvellously lovely, like he always is. But he was also kept in the dark. Sherlock could have told him, in time, but so much of it had passed before he realized he wanted to. It was too late.

And even if it wasn’t: Losing John in the twelfth was worse, far, far worse, than it had been before. Because John knew, then. And losing that was losing everyone who went before him along with him. Telling him, each time, and building up a history shared, only to see it ripped away again. Only to have to start over, still. No: it would be too much.

So he stayed quiet. He said: like this, I’m only losing one. One John. That, in itself, is painful enough.

This is only the second time he tells John.

It cements his decision. Finally, it is decided, irrevocably, within himself, that this: this is the last time he’ll wake up anew. This death, when it comes, will be the final one.


	2. Chapter 2

He wants as much time as possible, then. He has decided. It is the last he will ever have. 

John is eighteen. Sixty-six, he thinks, at least. We have at least until sixty-six. Forty-eight years. He’s tired. But it’s still an aching realization. A last life, forty-eight years. It will have to be enough.

He becomes John’s boyfriend. The word always seemed wrong before. Like something too youthful for them. Too innocent to explain the depth of their connection.

This time, it’s just right. 

John lies clothed next to him, and touches nothing but his fingertips to Sherlock’s face. To Sherlock’s collarbone. Fingertips to fingertips then, dancing in the moonlight beam from the window. John buys him an ice cream cone. John takes him to the library. John takes him to a theme-park. 

John is young. But Sherlock is young, too. He feels it in his very bones, the youth. It adds something he didn’t know it could. Consuming. That’s what it is. Burning through his flesh, raging. It is obsessive, almost. John, and John, and John, and John.

Sherlock reads John his favourite book. He tells him his dreams. He gives it all over, here, and here; take it. I want to be devoured by you.

Ever since their first life together, John is always Sherlock’s first. Everything. But sexual experience, too.

Here’s another first: 

They take off their clothes. It’s been months, now. In John’s bedroom, at his parents house, they take off their clothes. Fabric over heads, gentle hands prying it off. Open mouthed kisses to heated skin. Fumbling, desperate fingers, sneaking their way into previously closed-off spaces. So this is what youthful desire feels like, Sherlock thinks.

And here it is:

“You know,” John says. Strained, aroused. Following after “Like this?” and “Oh!” and “ _Sherlock_.”

“You know,” he says. “This is my first time.”

Sherlock kisses him. His lips are less yielding now, but still so very gentle. Skin soft. Hair so blonde it is almost close to white. Sherlock loves him. Sherlock loves him.

“Mine, too,” he says. It is his first time. It is the last of his firsts. 

John grins. 

“If it works like that,” he says. 

Because he knows now. And Sherlock had tried to forget, but oh how that adds something, too. The honesty they share makes his blood boil as it rushes through his veins along with desire. The things he can say; all of them, now.

John moves, into him. John gives, and gives, and gives. His breath: into Sherlock’s mouth. Pleasure: surging over Sherlock’s skin. Love. Gives it all. Love. He doesn’t know yet. He hasn’t said it. But Sherlock recognizes it now. 

He’s never been loved young before. A first, here, too.

“More,” he says. John does it again.

 

After, they lie in the moonlight, naked together in a non-sexual context for the first time. John touches Sherlock’s chest with a fingertip. He has stars on his ceiling. Made of plastic, lighting up the room. Given energy during the light and then, when darkness comes, emitting it itself. Sherlock watches them.

“Hey,” John says. Look at me. I’m over here. 

Sherlock turns his head. Watches him, takes him in. Affection has settled into his features. Sherlock will never understand. The way that John watches him, as if he is made from the very same fabric as the stars. The actual ones. And the ceiling ones too, perhaps.

“Hey,” he says. Watch me. I like the way you do it.

The tip of John’s nose is against his temple. Against his own. John’s lips are against his own, too. 

“I think I might be in love with you,” John whispers. Like it’s so huge it has to be a secret. Like it’d threaten to overcome him if it wasn’t.

Sherlock knew. He’s beginning to always do. That still holds nothing against actually hearing it.

“I know that I’m in love with you,” he says. 

“Already?” John asks. He’s joking. John, John, my John, Sherlock thinks. This is far later than already for me. But you know.

“Yes,” he says. 

John doesn’t know it all yet. He doesn’t know that this will be the last. He knows that there’s been love before, but not that there’s been loss. He will know. He will figure it out. But that is for another time.

This one, Sherlock thinks, is for the way John is shining, glinting, _beautiful_ , as he gifts Sherlock’s worn skin a smile. Then a kiss. Then a snigger of laughter. This one is for their youth. It feels good to let it be John’s, this time. 

“Already,” he says. “Always. 

Youth is a first. Life is a last. This is both.

__

It takes them a year to move in together, in this life. They are still young. Eighteen and nineteen respectively. 

It’s nothing but a shabby single-bedroom flat, where their mattress is on the floor, and the heating is off half the time. They are students. Medicine. Chemistry. They don’t have a lot of money. But between them they have a lot of love.

Time passes quickly. It flies by, in a way Sherlock had forgotten it would. He’s never remembered these years before. They haven’t been much. Just more waiting time until he’d go to John. 

It’s like he sees them for the first time, fresh and displayed in a well-lit counter. Yes, sir, this is a new assortment. Would you like to purchase the years of dreams so intense you can barely look straight at them? Sign up now, and you shall feel reborn.

It’s like he sees the pain for the first time, too. 

Harry is still on drugs, as she always is. Sherlock has known it time and time again, but he’s never been there during this. The first year. He’s always come in later, when the ache has settled down, and become dull and so ever-present you’re almost used to it, instead of sharp and insistent like it is at the start. He’s always known the after John. The one that was formed by the experience already. The one that had reached his closure. 

He’d forgotten what it was like. New pain. Fresh wounds. Every life has the same aches, for him, the same sorrows. It’s been dulled. It’s more all-consuming than it used to be. A sore spot that aches all through his body. But he’d forgotten the first cut of the knife; the sharpness of it. How it felt like you couldn’t breathe. 

He hates being here more than he thought he would. It feels wrong to look at, the pain. It’s ugly and irritated. Red, and gaping open. It’s so transparent it’s almost blinding. 

He sees John growing harder, too. He’s never seen it like this; how the shoulders that he noticed where un-squared when they met, become that. How John gets used to pain, just like Sherlock has.

“Is she ever all right?” John asks one 3am night where he’s still awake, on their mattress, staring at their ceiling. 

“Yes,” Sherlock says. He won’t keep information from John this time. Not this, at least. “Eventually.”

“How long?” John turns to look at him then, like he wants to be sure the see the truth in Sherlock’s eyes.

“A while.”

John looks away again.

“Sometimes it feels like I won’t make it,” John says. The knife is twisted, then. Sherlock is reminded. Of pain as blinding as this.

“I know,” he says. Because he remembers. Because it isn’t much help, now, to tell him that he will. It won’t take away what is here, at present. So he doesn’t say it. Instead, he puts his arm around John, and pulls him in against his own chest. Offering comfort, in the same way John has for him so many times. “I know.”

__

 

John realizes, this time, when Sherlock is twenty-two. That living several times, means losing several times, too.

Sherlock stands next to their fridge, on a Saturday night. He’s made tea, and poured in milk. For John. Sugar for himself. Does it mean something, he wonders? Does it say something about them?

John comes home. Sherlock knew he would; has been preparing for it. Tea is ready. Blanket is fetched for the couch. It’s late. John will be tired because of it. John will be tired because he’s been with Harry, too.

He turns around. Expects to see a tired face, a gentle smile, perhaps. Expects to reach out his hands, say “Come over here, let me kiss your temple, and take care of it.” 

It doesn’t happen like that. He turns around, and John is already watching him, with eyes slightly narrowed and a slender mouth. A beat, a moment, and it evens itself out. John’s face becomes neutral, safe for what is happening in his eyes. And oh, those eyes. There’s affection, but this time it is shrouded in the cloak of sadness. 

“You’ve realized,” Sherlock says. Because John is looking at him like he sees him all over again for the first time. 

“I’ve realized,” John agrees. There are four steps between them. He walks them. There is a distance between them, but John closes that too, when he puts his palm to Sherlock’s cheek. 

“How are you still so kind?” he asks. It’s the same tone he used when Sherlock first gave himself away, and John recognized recognition enough to realize that there was something special about Sherlock. Like he is amazed. Like he can’t quite grasp what is beneath his fingertips.

“How could I not?” Sherlock asks. With you, John. How could I be anything else?

“Losing is hardening me,” John says. 

It’s not just loss, Sherlock wants to say. John, my love. You’re so much more than a person I lose. You’re the vastest landscape I’ve seen. You’re worth it. He wants to say that. You’re so much more than worth it.

He doesn’t say any of it, because John puts a hand to his hip then, under his shirt, and says, “Will you let me take you to bed?”

Yes, Sherlock thinks. My sweetheart. That is the least I could do.

 

That night John spreads him out on the sheets, naked, in a way he’s hardly ever done. It’s not about sex at all. Sherlock doesn’t once get aroused. It’s difficult to, when John’s face looks like he’s just realized that Sherlock will be lost, one day. It was easier, last time John knew, because he knew from the start. Now, he’s had Sherlock for long enough already that the pain at the idea of losing him, or Sherlock doing the same, must be nothing short of suffocating. 

So he spreads Sherlock out on the sheets. And then he touches him. Gently, first, like he is simply mapping him out; committing him to memory. 

But harshly, then. He pushes his hands against Sherlock’s ribs. He grabs at his thighs. He scratches nails over Sherlock’s upper chest. This is not committing. This is knowing. Like trying to make himself remember that Sherlock is still here. That neither of them are gone yet. 

“You love me too much,” he says, with his fingers digging into Sherlock’s upper arms. 

“No.”

“How many times?” John asks. “How many times have you lost me?”

Not loss, Sherlock thinks. Worth it.

“I’ve known you fourteen,” he says. John grabs him harder. John closes his eyes; squeezes them shot. John gasps, like his chest is aching, but his eyes are a desert.

“Why?” he asks. “Why do you keep coming back? Am I worth that much? Can I really make up for the pain?”

Yes, Sherlock thinks, yes, yes, yes. 

“What else?” he says. Because John might not be able to understand his own value. But he can understand this.

“What do you mean?”

Sherlock grabs his face. Sherlock pulls him down, and presses their lips together. He does it gently, despite the force that John tries to give. Give me softness, he thinks. You don’t have to lose it just because you have to fight.

“Listen to me,” he says. “I lose you. But John, we live.” 

And they’ve done it, so much. Sherlock sees them before his eyes; all of the lives. All of the John’s, smiling at him, with fondness in their eyes. Holding his hand, showing him things, giving him kindness. 

“We _live_ ,” he says.

John’s expression changes. Smoothens itself out. The pain is dropped, for a moment. Put in a drawer somewhere. Sherlock wants to lock it, and throw away the key. But if he hadn’t had it, Sherlock thinks, he might not understand. He understands now.

John kisses him, and it’s not hard, and it’s not gentle. It’s life; infused with it, and all of the things they have had, will have, do have. 

“Okay,” he says. “So let’s live.”


	3. Chapter 3

The very first time John tells him he loves him, the very, very first time, he’s twenty-six and just four month out of rehab.

It takes them a while that time. Not because it isn’t felt. Sherlock didn’t know to call the inexplicable feeling that arose the first time he saw John love, but he knew as soon as they’d had their very first date. But it takes them a while. They are both in difficult situations. They want to do it right.

The feeling must have been there for John too, Sherlock thinks. The _something_. When John first tells him, it’s because he’s slung across the armchair in John’s flat – just his, for now – reading, with his legs slightly spread, like the first time they talked. 

Hands slide up Sherlock’s thighs. Sherlock has noticed John coming over, but only then looks up over the edge of his book. He bites his lower lip. John’s grip gets firmer.

“Well, this brings me back,” John says. 

“What to?” Sherlock asks, but he spreads his legs like he did back then; like he did the first time John kissed the sound of pleasure out of him.

“I love you, you know,” John says, and Sherlock’s heart feels far too large in his chest. So large, in fact, that it’s bursting through it.

“I didn’t know,” he says. Because it’s the first time he’s heard it, ever, in all of his three lives lead by then. He hoped. But he was yet too insecure to assume.

“I’m sorry,” John says. He bends down to kiss Sherlock’s kneecap. “You do now.”

“Say it again?” Sherlock requests. John’s smile is all teeth and fondness.

“I love you,” he says. 

“I know.”

John barks his laughter into the room. Sherlock joins him in it, just because it feels good. Sitting up in the chair, he leans in closer, so John could kiss him if he wanted. And John, well; John barely hesitates before he does.

__

In this life, he feels it more than ever. 

He didn’t think that was possible. Maybe it’s the end, drawing closer, underscoring the brilliance of what he has right now.

They move into a new flat. This one has pastel green bedroom walls, and a fridge of the same colour. This one is new, but living together is not.

They fill it with love. The flat. Their life. They kiss at night on the kitchen balcony. They walk through forests, and hold hands. They go to bars for people like them, and revel in not having to hide. They never sleep not intertwined. They live. They live. They live.

It’s not him who tells John that this will be his last. 

He couldn’t. There’s never a good time. They’re young, still. Sherlock is only thirty. There will be plenty of time, he thinks. Plenty of time later, to say the words out loud.

But John is cleverer, still, than even Sherlock realized. John is, really, a brilliant man.

Moonlight hits their faces, as they stand on their naked feet in the kitchen, sharing a cup of tea. Toast is being prepared for them to eat. Toes are touching on the floor between them. John’s hand is on his shoulder, just resting.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” he asks. For a moment, Sherlock is worried. This is what happened last time too. What followed is not a thing he could bear to experience again.

“I don’t know,” he says. Lying is not something he can do, not to John. Not to this one, and not about this. “Don’t you like us to be a choice?” he continues. “Don’t you like us to choose each other because we’re good together?”

“You’re the best choice I ever made,” John says. Relief is the hand around his heart letting go of its grip. 

The white skin of John’s inner forearm is displayed to him, as John turns his arm around. It’s where Sherlock wrote his number, back years now. And he remembers: This time, John was the one who set the wheels in motion.

“I love you,” John tells him, and Sherlock has never felt it back quite as strongly as this.

“Can I ask you something?” John goes on. Sherlock nods. “Is this a good life? Comparatively, I mean?”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Sherlock asks. 

John’s smile is private. John’s smile is directed to the place where he is putting his hand up under Sherlock’s shirt, and splaying it on his stomach. Sherlock is only wearing boxers and a tee. He could get aroused, just from this.

“Hm?” John says; occupied elsewhere.

“You’re my favourite.”

“Oh.” Wider now, teeth and wrinkles and all eyes, too. “Is that so?”

“Hm,” Sherlock confirms. Allowing it is not a question, when John’s hands sneak to the naked skin on his back, and John’s nose burrows into his neck. They’re intertwined, like this. For a while, all they do is stand.

“I’m your last, aren’t I?” John says then. 

Sherlock freezes. John must have known for a while. Oh love, he thinks. I wanted you to have more time without knowing.

“How did you know?” he asks.

“You’re transparent, my love,” John says. 

The endearment sounds regretful in his mouth, tonight. Infused with the loss that love so often heightens. Their eyes meet, when John pulls back to let them. Sherlock doesn’t look away. 

“And,” John goes on, “you don’t live like someone who has another life in store.”

They’re young, Sherlock thinks, but John has always been quick to become wise. Maybe he’s never not.

“You’re right,” Sherlock says. Not because John needs to be told. Because when he couldn’t give the truth, he can give this: the confirmation.

“Yeah,” John says. His lips press between Sherlock’s eyebrows. “I always am.”

Yes, Sherlock thinks. You always are.

__

It takes until his ninth life, before Sherlock learns of the kinds of pills that can kill you even if you’re used to always waking back up. 

It’s Mycroft who tells him. 

When Sherlock is ten, in every one of his lives, his grandfather dies. He’s an old man, got children late, so it’s never much of a surprise to anyone. It still pains Sherlock into his very bones each time. 

The wake is held afterwards, in his grandparent’s house. It’s almost like all of the people thinking about his grandfather is enough to conjure him up. It isn’t until the weeks later, when Sherlock will go visit, that the feeling of the deep-seated emptiness, that a person no longer there leaves behind, will make itself known.

He is sitting in the corner of the room, on a wooden-legged chair, when Mycroft comes over to join him. For long stretched-out moments, they sit in nothing but silence.

“There is medicine,” Mycroft says then, as if they were already having a conversation. Sherlock pays him more notice, but doesn’t shift. He keeps looking ahead, at the feet of everyone mingling before them.

“For?” he asks.

“Dying.”

It is easy to realise that Mycroft is talking about more than normal death. 

“Permanently?” he still asks. 

When he turns his head to watch Mycroft, Mycroft’s eyes are closed. The way his chest raises itself slowly makes it seem like he’s trying hard to draw in proper breaths. 

“Yes,” Mycroft says. “They are hard to get by. And not for this one.”

“No,” Sherlock agrees. None of them are there yet. But they will be there, at some point. He can see it in the cards of his life already. 

“But they exist,” Mycroft finishes. As if this is the conclusion. It is. 

Without saying anything further, Mycroft gets up from the chair beside Sherlock’s again. He stands, for a moment, as if unsure. Shifts the weight on his feet. Purses and un-purses his lips. 

He turns around.

“Sherlock,” he says, facing him now. Sherlock glances up, so their eyes will meet. 

“Yes?” 

There’s something like significance in Mycroft’s eyes. Little does he know then, but he will remember the look he sees there for lives and lives to come. It’s the first time for a long time that he feels like Mycroft’s little brother again. Like the kid who Mycroft has vowed to protect, and keep safe. The kid whose bad decisions and destructive tendencies, Sherlock realises later, Mycroft is potentially enabling right now.

“Don’t go without me,” Mycroft says. It’s the first time he asks. It’s the last.

__

Back in this life, the last one, he sits on the rooftop next to John, and has his hand cradled in-between John’s fingers. John kisses it. 

He’s changed, Sherlock thinks. When Harry was first in trouble, John experienced the twisting, insistent ache of first-time pain. This, the way he looks now, is knowing it. His face is firm lines, and his free hand is clenching and unclenching repeatedly. This is the look of someone who is used to fighting back.

“Sixteen,” Sherlock says. He doesn’t know how else to explain. “It’s a long time.”

He means: I want you to understand. He means: John, my darling, I am so, so tired. 

“I understand,” John says. “I can imagine.”

Words escape them both, but it might not matter. This cannot be articulated, Sherlock thinks. This can only be felt. 

“Can you forgive me?” he asks. “For the choice?”

He doesn’t know if John’s answer will change anything. If he says no, what will Sherlock do? He might go back for another round, Sherlock thinks. He would do that, just as he would do anything else, for John. 

John, however, oh John; John says, “Yes. I can.” And then he squeezes Sherlock’s hand close, and puts it to his cheek, just to rest. Warmth seeps into his fingertips from John’s skin, and Sherlock is reminded of life, life, life, surging fervently through them both.

Tears are rolling down his cheeks. He only then realises, because John turns back to watch him. Because John sees them and, then, with a hand as gentle as sunlight in the early morning, he dries them off and takes them, packs them away. Ever the strong one, Sherlock thinks. John’s eyes are dry. But then, still, his eyes are overflowing with emotion. 

“Well,” John says, as if they just made a deal and shook hands on it. “We should see your brother more. And we should share more morning-breath kisses.”

Sherlock smiles and then, when John turns to watch him fondly, he laughs. He does, because John is more of a wonder than he will ever be able to fathom. Because John is the best man he knows.

__

This John Watson is his last.

That night, in bed, John puts their foreheads together, and says, “Tell me about the first one.”

Sherlock does. He tells John, this one, of how the other one saved him. Of how they met, and John was kind and understanding, in a way that no one had been up until then. Of how they were fumbling, but so passionate that it didn’t matter anyway. Of how Sherlock knew, almost immediately, that he would always come back.

“I’m glad he was good to you,” John says after, and, “I’m glad he found you.”

When he says that, Sherlock leans in so close that their entire faces are touching. It isn’t kissing when their lips meet. All it is, is lack of distance between them.

“I’m grateful, in fact,” John goes on. “It’s his doing that I have you now.”

“You aren’t sad to be the last?” Sherlock asks. 

“No.” John says it like he’s considered it already, and is certain of his response. “No. It’s an honour.”

Sherlock smiles, softly, and mostly in relief and because of the marvel it is to have ever been loved with a fierceness like this.

“You know,” he says, “I loved you immediately even then.” 

He’s been considering if, maybe, after all, they were written into the fabric of the universe. Maybe this is the only anatomically predictable thing about it: the two of them, and their love. When he rewinds the clock, to go back to the beginning, it isn’t his first life he finds. It’s John. It’s his eyes, and the pull of Sherlock’s entire body that accompanied the vision of them. It’s John. Just that. John.

John smiles when he says it, and this one is entirely stitched together from fondness.

“If I know me right,” he says, “he did, too.”


	4. Chapter 4

They don’t get married in this life until five years later, when Sherlock is thirty-five. This is not a thing they’ll rush just because the end is near. 

It’s Sherlock who asks, this time. It’s not that he thinks John wouldn’t do it. But it’s always him. For the last time, Sherlock wants to do something new. 

It is still casual. They’ve never expressed themselves much in big gestures. And when you live long enough, you start realising that the little things have far more impact than the big.

They’re in the library when he asks. Books are stacked up and down the aisles, reaching all the way to the ceiling. They could walk down different ones, but they don’t. They do this, as everything else, together. 

Despite his many lives, Sussex never stops being appealing. Neither does the bees. By now, they feel like a routine of closure. Like the ritual you do before you sleep, to help yourself best to slumber, this is the way he prepares best for the end.

His hands find a book about the various species of bees, and hands it to John. 

“I like these,” he says. 

“Books about bees?” John asks. His hand has been glued to Sherlock’s lower back the entire afternoon. Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“Bees, just,” he says. 

“Oh.” John knew, but is teasing him. Sherlock’s heart should have stopped doing backflips a long time ago, but it hasn’t.

“Would you be okay with them?” he asks. They’re still walking along, but slower now.

“Aren’t I usually?”

“Hm.” Walking in front of John, he stops them. “I’m trying to make this go somewhere,” he says. “You need to follow the script.”

This up close, John has to crane his neck to look Sherlock in the eye. His laughter, when he gifts it, is all warmth and affection. It is still, after all this time, Sherlock’s favourite sound. 

“All right,” he says. “I’d be absolutely fine with them, as long as you were there too?”

Sherlock bites his lip not to smile.

“I was going to ask you if you’d also be all right with a future with me next, but your reply is way too far ahead for that,” he says. 

John is grinning now, wide and deep, and his hands have snaked themselves up under Sherlock’s shirt, to cup his naked hips.

“What is it that you’re saying?” he asks. Like he already knows. 

“Well, I was going to ask you to marry me, but–“

The rest of the sentence is lost, when John crashes into him and swallows the sound out of him in a kiss. Their teeth clank together, because of their happiness, but Sherlock does the opposite of care. What he does care about is snogging John right back, until they’re both a bit breathless right there, in the middle of the library aisle for books about bees.

“What was the line?” John asks, when he pulls back. He stays close by Sherlock’s face. “The one you were leading up to?”

“Well, you were going to say that yes, you would like a future with me,” Sherlock says. John nods against his neck. “And then I would ask something like ‘and how would you feel about wearing a band to have something to show for it?’” 

John kisses him again. How could he not?

“I think,” he says, “that I would find that absolutely marvellous.”

“Brilliant, even,” Sherlock says. John grins. This is what he said when they first met.

“Yes,” he says. “Brilliant. Even that.”

__

They still do it as a small ceremony for a not-too-large audience. 

When he puts the ring on John’s finger he thinks, this is truly till death do us part this time. He didn’t know this would be something they shared, too. This time they have a common history, because Sherlock shares it, but it’s larger than twelve, because this time they have a shared ending in front of them, too.

That night, in their honeymoon hotel room, while John is moving into him for the second time, slowly and sensuously now, they talk about the beginning that only they share.

“The first time I met you,” John says, “it felt a bit like I already knew you.” 

Sherlock’s cock is only half-hard between them. His whole body is electrified with pleasure, but it’s not purely from the sex. 

It’s the way John looks at him too, the way they come together, sharing their breaths, keeping each other alive. Sherlock has lived so many lives, but John is the one who looks like he sees the entirety of the universe in Sherlock’s face. Like he’s seen true beauty, true wonder, and this is it.

“I don’t think it was remembering,” John says. “It was just– looking at you, and knowing that we’d have a connection unlike anything I’d previously experienced. Recognising something.”

“I gave you quite a few hints, I think,” Sherlock says.

“Hm.” Shifting a bit, John finds a better angle, and moves into Sherlock once more. As he dips down to kiss Sherlock’s upper chest, Sherlock’s pleasure gets stronger, and he hardens again. 

“I felt it,” John goes on. “When you kissed me. I felt the history there.”

“I could feel that you did,” Sherlock says.

“Hm,” John repeats. Growing more laboured, his breath comes out in shorter bursts. The movement of their bodies together gets more insistent again. 

“Is this going anywhere?” Sherlock asks. His tone is beginning to become breathless once more. “Are you saying something?”

“Not really,” John says. “Just: We’re good together.”

Sherlock kisses him, because he can. Because he can’t not. Because John is referencing their talk about soulmates and, maybe, Sherlock has changed his mind. Perhaps that is what they’re saying: I don’t understand how a love like this can exist, if not for the fact that it’s the very thing that has been predicted since the universe was first set in motion. 

“Yes,” Sherlock says. Because John will understand. “We’re good together.”

__

They live. 

They have Mycroft around more, and they take more weekend trips away. Sherlock holds John’s hand most of the time they go out, and John cleans both of their rings daily. This life feels crystal-clear in a way that must have something to do with the ending of it.

Sherlock thinks about that. Only occasionally, in bed late at night, when John’s breath lands softly upon his skin. When John’s face evens out, becomes soft and gentle, and Sherlock is reminded the most of how he looked back when they were young and just starting. He thinks about what it will be like to lose him.

__

The first life with John is the worst.

The first life is gut-wrenching, knife-twisting pain inside of Sherlock’s chest, as he watches John’s unknowing smile beginning to fail to recognise him. He’s not prepared then. He doesn’t know what will come. That means that it hits him harder than ever.

John dies before him. It doesn’t matter much, because he follows almost immediately after. When he calls Mycroft up, and says, “John has died,” Mycroft is silent for a long time, before he breathes in deeply, and says, “I’ll see you when you’re five?”

Losing him is the most difficult thing Sherlock has done up until that point. Meeting him again is worse.

He’s in rehab, once more. This is the life where he doesn’t dare take any chances, less it makes John pass him by. He worms himself in on Harry, and feels sick with longing whenever she mentions John’s name. He waits. But he does so with desperation.

The day John comes to visit Harry for the first time, and their eyes meet from across the room once more, Sherlock has to make use of all of the strength his body possesses in order not to crash into him right there, kissing, and kissing, and kissing him.

But there’s no recognition to the way John looks at him then. There’s intrigue; he’s heard of Sherlock from Harry’s mouth. But not the knowledge of their history of love.

This is one of those lives where they shag on their first day of meeting. Sherlock follows him to the bathroom when he goes, and does kiss him there, taking, and taking, and taking. Desire has to stand in for love, he thinks. It has to be enough that John touches him with passionate hands. 

It turns out that the warmth of sweat and sex is nothing like the warmth of years of fondness. Sherlock leaves a still-unclothed John behind, feeling emptier than he has for an entire life. That night he drowns in the tears of losing once more. But the next time John comes by, he hands him his number, and says, “I’d like us to start over.”

“Do I know you?” John asks, as he takes the paper with the number on it. “I mean, outside of this. Have we met before?”

Sherlock closes his eyes. He tries, desperately, to breathe. 

“No,” he says. It’s the first time he answers with a lie.

__

Back in this one, he is forty-five. 

John’s hair is already beginning to tint grey. It is most evident under the bathroom lighting, in the shower, with the curtain closed, right before the water starts falling. Sherlock sees it often. Sherlock is often there.

As such things go, the most important conversations always happen at night.

This one happens in the place where Sherlock sees greying hair, after sex, at 2 am. This one happens with John curled around his back, John’s hands on his stomach, and John swaying them back and forth, to the tune of music only they can hear.

“How does it work?” he asks, into Sherlock’s wet nape. “You’ll die,” he says. “So you won’t come back like you usually do. But will I? Does this mean there’s a timeline where I exist and you don’t?”

“I don’t know,” Sherlock says. He doesn’t. He’s never cared much about the specifics, outside of how it affects himself. He never thought he’d need to know this. “I’m not sure.”

“Can we do something?” John asks. “To _make_ sure?”

He doesn’t have to clarify. Sherlock understands enough to understand the desired outcome of their trying. 

“There are pills,” he says. “For us.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe if you take them too, this will be the end of us all,” he says. “And you will never be born again.” He swallows. “Either.”

John’s nose rubs over his skin, and his palms grab a little at Sherlock’s chest. It’s different, now, than it was when John first realised Sherlock had lost before. Lost _him_ before. This is resigned. This is comfort, the only way they know how. This is wanting not to do the same.

“I don’t want to be born into a life where you’re not present,” John says, and Sherlock understands. He already knew.

“Can I ask you something?” John goes on.

“Yes.”

“How do I die?”

Sherlock is forty-five, and John only now asks. It’s the only question, it seems, that he won’t rush. The only thing he decides that he’ll live better not knowing.

“You lose your memory,” Sherlock says. His voice is desperate in its neutrality.

John’s forehead lands upon his neck, pressing in, burrowing. It’s sadness, Sherlock knows. It’s a movement he recognises. It’s the one that is accompanied by John’s eyes closing, and his breath going shallow. By the knife twisted in his gut.

“I’m sorry,” John says. Because he realises what it means. Sherlock doesn’t reply.

“This time I want to die before I start forgetting you.”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. He already knew. He was ready. Sixty-six, and the loss will surely start. “We can do that.”

John stops swaying them. Instead, he shifts Sherlock around, and allows their eyes to meet. When he kisses him, it’s more a promise, than it is anything else. This time, it says, I will make the loss gentle. This time, I will try and spare you the pain.

Sherlock kisses him back. The conclusion of this is that John doesn’t want to lose him either, in the sense of loss that is existing without. So Sherlock kisses him back. And what it says is, I’ve had enough pain for the both of us. Let’s spare you from it. It says, at least, we can do that.


	5. Chapter 5

Just like Sherlock suggested when he proposed, and like they’ve done in every other life, they buy their house in Sussex, and Sherlock tends bees.

John doesn’t have to be told that they’ve lived here before. He can see it on Sherlock’s face, Sherlock knows. He can recognise the familiarity Sherlock has with this place, just as he once recognised the familiarity Sherlock has with him. 

“Do you ever get bored?” he asks, when they’re out looking at it for the first time. “Of the same thing repeated?”

“No,” Sherlock says. He reaches out and touches John’s shoulder, his neck, any part of him that is reachable. “It’s never the same.”

“Really?” 

“Yes.”

“Why is that?” 

He is touching Sherlock’s cheek. He is leaning into him, clawing nails into a shoulder with his free hand, looking up at him, licking his lips. He is enticed. Sherlock recognises it, and leans in close, to entice him some more.

“Cosmology,” he says. 

He doesn’t explain like he did in twelve. In this one, it seems, John figures it out on his own. 

“Interesting,” he says. “Fascinating.” 

Leaning in closer, their lips almost, nearly touch. Sherlock wants it; makes himself ready for it. But just before they meet, John grins, and pulls away. Turning the back of his head to Sherlock, he walks on, but between them he intertwines their fingers.

“Yes,” Sherlock mumbles, to himself, under his breath. “You are.”

__

 

Eight years pass. Sherlock is fifty-five. 

John still cleans their rings daily. More often than not he reads in the rocking chair on their porch, while Sherlock is tending to the bees. If he looked up, he could see John from across the garden. If he looked up, John might too, and they’d smile, just a little and to themselves, because maybe death is coming, but this is what it feels like to be feverously living, loving, too.

He doesn’t, but John watches him, he can feel it, even without seeing.

“Why are you looking at me?” he calls to John. When he glances up, John is dipping his head back down, and appears to be going back to his book.

“I’m not,” he says. 

But when Sherlock goes back to work, he feels John’s eyes on him again. He smiles to himself. It’s the way they love now, too: even when he isn’t looking it straight in the eye, he still feels it radiating from John towards him.

“I can still feel it,” he calls. 

“Doesn’t someone think they’re smart?” John calls back. But when Sherlock glances up towards him, John is watching him again with affection seeping out of his pores. 

Sherlock goes to kiss him, because even if he knows it without seeing it now, there is nothing better than looking love straight in the eye and drowning in the intensity of it.

__

Five more years pass, and Sherlock is sixty. John is sixty-three. The end is drawing closer.

“You don’t have that long left,” he tells John, when they’re in bed one night. Instead of turning away, this time, John turns to watch him.

“Okay,” he says. He takes Sherlock’s hand, and kisses its palm. “Okay.”

__

When John is sixty-four Sherlock thinks, two years: two, and it will certainly begin. John doesn’t want to know too much, so he doesn’t say it out loud, but he whispers it into John’s skin sometimes, when he’s sleeping. Two years. Time has passed quickly, but then, he thinks, it has not.

Mycroft comes to live with them not long after. It’s John’s idea. “This is the last time for the two of you as well,” he says, and Sherlock will have to agree. He’s never had this, either, but by now he’s used to the John of this life surprising him.

Mycroft gets them all the pills, three of them, white and sleek when Sherlock holds them in a palm. They put them in a drawer, the same that holds the receipt from their first date, and the place cards, with their names on them, from the wedding. The one that contains their lives. How fitting, Sherlock thinks, that it should contain the means to end it, too.

This time, when John’s dementia first hits, Sherlock doesn’t cry. For the first time in all of his lives, he’s ready. Instead, he watches John softly, and reaches out a hand for him. John realises what it means, although he doesn’t remember forgetting. Their fingers slot perfectly together by this point.

“So, it’s now,” Sherlock says. 

“Let’s give ourselves a week.”

Sherlock nods. He squeezes John’s hand. A week to live, he thinks. Or, perhaps, a week to die. 

__

On the second to last day, they sit in their bathtub together, and hold each other’s hands. 

Their bodies are old now. John is all wrinkles, and sagging skin, and greyness. Sherlock loves him like this. Always has. It’s the evidence of their history. Of all of their time together. And, he thinks, the deepening of the lines by John’s eyes is the evidence of all of their laughter, too.

“To you,” John begins, “this is out last life. But to me this is our only one.”

“Which is more merciful, do you think?” Sherlock asks. 

“I don’t know.” John glances out the window for a moment. As if he’s considering. When he looks back, it’s like he’s decided something.

“When my mum died,” he goes on. It happened when he was seven, and far too young for Sherlock to have been a part of it. “I used to wonder if it would’ve been less painful to never have remembered her at all. But then I wouldn’t have had anything other than her absence to know her by.”

Sherlock closes his eyes, and leans in to rest their foreheads together. Loss is aching in him, but so is love. Emotions are larger than even his body. Soon they won’t be contained any longer.

“I’m glad to have known you, John,” he says. “Every imaginable version of you.”

“This isn’t just goodbye to me, is it?” John asks. “This is goodbye to all of us.”

When you lose someone, your world stops spinning. Not _the_ world; just yours. It’s like a spotlight, being pointed at you. The world is still going, moving right along, while you are left to consider how the universe can even still be in motion at all.

Sherlock takes comfort in knowing that, in some ways, many worlds will stop their spinning for them. 

Memories, he said, once upon a time, are most complete when they’re forgotten. That is the end of their circle. Once Sherlock leaves, and leaves his memories behind as well, every single one of the Johns that has taken residence inside of him will be freed too. 

“Yes,” he says. Because it will be enough to make this one understand. John kisses his knuckles in reply and, then, his ring.

“Do you think we have memories when we die?” Sherlock asks. Like John did last time they were both in the know. 

“No,” John says. It’s a lie. Sherlock loves him for it.

“Thank you,” he says. John squeezes his hand.

“Are you scared?” he asks.

“No.”

That is a lie, too. And John knows it. But he sends Sherlock nothing but a soft smile, and says, “Good.”

Yes, Sherlock thinks. It has been, hasn’t it?

__

 

When he was little, during his very first life, his mum taught him a trick for when he was scared.

“You can do anything,” she said, “for just one minute. You don’t have to worry about the rest. All you do is figure out how to get through the next sixty seconds. And then you do that again. And again. And before you know it, the scary thing you feared, is over.”

He lives the last two days one minute at a time. 

A minute: John makes him tea in the morning. A minute: He fetches his bee’s honey for the last time. A minute: He sits by Mycroft’s side, and listens to him talking. A minute: He gets love. A minute: He gives love. 

A minute: he’s scared. A minute: he’s ready. 

So when they sit outside on the grass, during the last hour of their lives, John takes his hands and says, “Let’s go gently.”

Sherlock keeps holding him. For once he doesn’t hesitate before he turns, and holds Mycroft too, with his other hand. Even John and Mycroft touch. 

They swallow the pills.

A minute: his heartbeat slowing. A minute: his muscles dying. A minute: his vision blurring.

A minute: hands holding his. A minute: sun hitting his warm body. A minute: the sound of birds chirping.

A minute: love. A minute: love. A minute: love.

They say that, when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. When Sherlock dies, the image that speeds past him, repeated and with so many variations, an infinite amount of them, is John. Just that. John. 

They revert back, the images, until they stop. When they do, it’s John’s smile he sees. The one he sent Sherlock the very first time their eyes met. The image freezes. This is the start. This is the creation. His own personal universe.

This is the end.

He breathes in. He closes his eyes. He exhales.

This is the last time he dies. 

A minute: all of the memories disappearing into the air above them, tangible and heavy and, then, being let go.

This is the first time he dies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I lift the last scene from 'the theory of everything'
> 
> Anyway. You can find me on tumblr at [tenderlock](http://tenderlock.tumblr.com), and I'd be thrilled if you left me a comment below, telling me what you thought!


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